Sugata Bose (Jadavpur MP): You cannot be a true nationalist if you are opposed to freedom. It is not a crime to seek freedom from caste oppression, class exploitation, gender discrimination. We must give our students and the youth the freedom to think, the freedom to speak, the freedom to be idealistic, and, yes, the freedom to make mistakes, and learn from them. What must be avoided at all costs is the criminalisation of dissent… (Interruptions).
I heard the speech given by Kanhaiya Kumar on YouTube. I agreed with many things he said. I disagreed with some of the things that he said. I agreed with him when he extolled Ambedkar's commitment to constitutional rights and constitutional morality. I agreed with him when he expressed admiration for our revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Asfaquallah, Sukhdev and Rajguru. He, of course, said the RSS took no part in our freedom struggle. There, too, he was right… (interruptions)... but as a teacher I would have liked to have a discussion with him about history and I would have pointed out to him that even the Communists had actually taken part in the freedom struggle but betrayed it at crucial moments during the 1942 movement and the Azad Hind Movement led by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. So, we condemn the vigilantism of self-appointed protectors of the nation who are trying to create a climate of fear.
Saugata Roy (Dum Dum MP): Did the Communists not betray the 1942 movement?... (Interruption)
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Kalyan Banerjee (Sreerampur MP): Communists were anti-nationals and were not there in the freedom movement… (Interruption)... You are not the master of the House… (Interruption)... You are behaving as if you are the custodian of the House… (Interruption)
Speaker Sumitra Mahajan: Kalyan Banerjee, you are disturbing the member from your own party. He is speaking very well. Please take your seat.
Sugata Bose: Madam Speaker, as I have said, I stand for the right to free expression of my Communist friends and they will be speaking in this House soon afterwards. But we condemn the acts of vigilantism by self-appointed protectors of the nation, which foment a climate of fear and I believe that students, teachers and university personnel must all be permitted to express opinions freely even if they conflict with the government's political stances and the government must end the witch-hunt for anti-nationals and the shameful "scapegoating" of university students. Why? It is because we believe that this witch-hunt is meant to distract the nation from issues necessary to its development, such as employment opportunities and poverty alleviation. We insist that no group within the Indian polity or in its diaspora be the univocal spokesperson for the nation. History shows us that state-sponsored or state-condoned campaigns against so-called anti-nationals lead to authoritarian rule and the destruction of democratic principles. If universities and students are attacked, then the legacy of anti-colonial freedom struggle and of democratic reconstruction is gravely undermined.
Madam Speaker, we learn our lessons in nationalism from great figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose and those of us who are from Bengal are also inspired by what we have been taught about patriotism and nationalism by figures like Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh. I was wondering whose definition of nationalism might be acceptable to my friends in the Treasury Benches. I thought that at least I would try by citing before them the example of Aurobindo.
The issue of Kashmir kept coming up in the speech given by Anurag Thakur. Now, it is incumbent on all of us, who are the elected representatives of the Lok Sabha, to give a greater sense of belonging to the Union of India among the people of Jammu and Kashmir and all of our far-flung states. The issue is: What kind of an Indian Union do we want? Aurobindo touched upon "the secret of the difficulty in the problem of unifying ancient India". And he cited ancient texts. He said the rishis from the Vedic Age onwards propounded "the ideal of the Chakravarti, a uniting imperial rule, uniting without destroying the autonomy of India's many kingdoms and peoples from sea to sea". The ruler was meant to establish a suzerainty. The "full flowering" of this ideal, Aurobindo found in the great epics. The Mahabharata narrates the legendary and quasi-historic pursuit of this ideal of empire, which even "the turbulent Shishupala" is represented as accepting in his attendance at Yudhisthira's dharmic Rajasuya sacrifice. The Ramayana too presents "an idealised picture of such a Dharmarajya, a settled universal empire". It is, in Aurobindo's words, "not an autocratic despotism but a universal monarchy supported by a free assembly of the city and provinces and of all the classes that is held up as the ideal". According to his ideal, unification "ought not to be secured at the expense of the free life of the regional people or of the communal liberties and not therefore by a centralised monarchy or a rigidly unitarian imperial state". We are a democracy, but the nationalism that is being talked about from the other side of the House represents centralised despotism.
I mentioned Tagore. He composed our National Anthem. But he was also a powerful critic of nationalism. He knew that nationalism could be both a boon and a curse. He wrote beautiful patriotic songs during our Swadeshi movement. But then he also saw that nationalism could lead to the carnage of war in Europe during World War I and that is why, when he travelled the world in 1916, he first went to Japan and then the USA. He gave lectures on nationalism and we find a powerful critique of nationalism in those lectures. Those lectures were published in a book titled Nationalism in 1917.
I sometimes fear that those who are defining nationalism so narrowly will end up one day describing Tagore as anti-national if they read some of the sentences in his book on nationalism... (Interruption)... We always had different visions of nationhood and it is really a debate and discussion about what should be an ideal form of the Union of India that has animated the thought of all of the great figures that I have talked about. Chittaranjan Das of course had debates with Tagore but they were respectful towards each other. Chittaranjan Das felt that you could have nationalism where you are very proud of Bengal, your region, but you can be a very proud Indian nationalist at the same time. All of this, of course, has to flower in the garden of internationalism.
Edited excerpts from a speech by Sugata Bose, Trinamool Congress MP from Jadavpur in the Lok Sabha, in New Delhi, on February 24
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